We have all heard the stories of businesses which have suffered debilitating DDoS attacks and, in some cases, succumbing altogether. Take Code Spaces, the web-based SVN and Git hosting provider which suffered such an attack in June 2014 that it was forced to wave the white flag and cease trading after recovering all the data lost would cost too much.

Now, a new piece of research from A10 Networks argues businesses face ‘sudden death’ from DDoS if caught unawares. The average company was hit by an average of 15 DDoS attacks per year, according to the survey of 120 IT decision makers, with larger organisations more badly affected.

One in three (33%) respondents said they had encountered DDoS attacks of more than 40 Gbps, while one in five had suffered downtimes of more than 36 hours due to the attack. The average attack of those polled lasted 17 hours.

More than half (54%) of respondents said they would increase their DDoS budgets in the coming six months, while multi-vector attacks were seen by the majority of those polled (77%) as the most dangerous form of DDoS threat in the future.

“DDoS attacks are called ‘sudden death’ for good reason. If left unaddressed, the costs will include business, time to service restoration and a decline in customer satisfaction,” said A10 Networks CTO Raj Jalan. He added: “The good news is our findings show that security teams are making DDoS prevention a top priority. With a better threat prevention system, they can turn an urgent business threat into an FYI-level notification.”

Previous research has examined the growing sophistication of DDoS threats. In April, Neustar argued that such DDoS issues were “unrelenting”, with more than seven in 10 global brands polled having been subject to an attack.